Deborah Howell

The editors of the mainstream media must think we all have very short memories. Their latest schtick is to smear conservative talk show host Glenn Beck as a creepy Mormon who has no business influencing evangelicals. Aside from the disgusting hypocrisy of Mormon-baiting one minute and then bashing Islamophobia the next, these news outlets are also hoping you've forgotten about their recent…

Deborah Howell, the Washington Post’s ombudsman from late 2005 through the end of 2008, “suffered fatal injuries when struck by a vehicle” while vacationing in New Zealand, an overnight post on WashingtonPost.com reported early Saturday morning. Howell, the top editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Washington bureau chief for the Newhouse newspaper chain before jumping to the Post, recognized…

Some quick items from the Sunday interview shows and newspapers: ♦ On Meet the Press, NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell, who last month hailed Obama's “all-star cabinet,” on Sunday trumpeted the cabinet's “meritocracy,” and how it's supposedly made up of “superstars,” as she gushed over “people with so much brain power and so much education.” ♦ Over on ABC's This Week, during the roundtable's look at…

A week after Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell agreed with readers who saw “a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama” in the paper's campaign coverage, Howell this Sunday admitted she voted for Obama and “bet” that so did “most” in the Post's newsroom: I'll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel…

The media's post-election truth leaks are in full swing now as the Washington Post will publish an admission from its ombudsman Sunday that it was clearly biased towards Barack Obama in its coverage of the just-concluded presidential campaign.Isn't the truth great when it doesn't hurt your agenda?Although Deborah Howell's piece "An Obama Tilt in Campaign Coverage" will appear in Sunday's print…

Dismissing the notion as "simplistic" that her paper is liberally biased, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote on Sunday that there is "a grain of truth" to the lament from conservatives that the Post skews leftward (emphases mine):Neither the hard-core right nor left will ever be satisfied by Post coverage -- and that's as it should be. But it's true that The Post, as well as much of…

Writing in today's Washington Post, ombudsman Deborah Howell focuses on political cartoons and how in many cases they can cause offense. I was struck in particular by a few of Howell's offhand admissions most. The first is that the top editorial cartoonists across the country are mostly liberal. That concession came after Howell had briefly profiled Pat Oliphant, one of America's best-known…

Last year, the Washington Post let itself be so badly misled by a "study" on military recruiting from a far-left think tank that WaPo ombudsman Deborah Powell felt obliged to write a lengthy column about the matter, diplomatically taking her paper to task for failing to "tell the full story."So when the same think tank came out with another recruiting study this year, surely WaPo would take it…

Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell served up a flimsy excuse to a concerned reader wondering why the Post doesn't have Post staffers reporting on the Bilal Hussein controversy, rather than just running AP wire stories. Hussein worked for AP as a photographer. Blogger Scott Johnson shared the reader's e-mail and Howell's reply, then added that even if one accepts Howell's excuse, there's no…